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Email transparency

stripe.com

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Re: Email transparency

#61

Post by buu700 »

Terretta wrote: post #35

Part of the issue around transparency is that email inbox silos may be the wrong tool for a collaborative and productive tech company. In general, email is now being seen (as often remarked by ShowHN MVPs) as To Do lists, and in a tech shop, multiple people have an interest in that process. This results in unenforceable policies about To: vs Cc: and unwieldy threads you're never sure if you should delete the tail nes…

You don't create a new email thread to give yourself a To Do item

Maybe I'm just weird, but I do this pretty frequently (fire off quick instructions/reminders with "TODO:" prepended); after all, there's very little besides email that I care enough about to check frequently enough for any action items I assign to myself to matter.

I understand and agree with the idea behind the "Show HN" projects you mention, but as a potential user, at the end of the day all I really care about is that my personal system/workflow works and helps me get stuff done, not how structured or semantically beautiful my data is. The last thing I need is yet another application/service to demand time/attention from my day.

(On a similar note, I've never been able to commit myself to a well-organised file structure with meaningful nested directories, an indexing system, and so forth, when a flat directory holding tens of thousands of files + ls and whatever regexes has Just Worked for me for years, despite not being pretty.)

Re: Email transparency

#62

Post by codenerdz »

Nearly all of these use cases are covered by a number of social enterprise platforms such as Yammer or Socialcast without the need for new employees to setup filters.

In Socialcast activity streams can be filtered by groups which could be public, private or externally facing(meaning you can invite people outside your company to participate in them). People can be notified directly by @-mentioning them in your posts and so forth. And of course all the content is searchable and filterable.

The usefulness of these social enterprise tools was not clear to me until I saw it being used in both a 40-people company and a 13,000-people company. It brings about collaboration, transparency, a way for people to discuss their issues and to often vent about things they dont like.

Maybe its time for Stripe to check it out too :)

Disclaimer: I work for Socialcast, the VMWare company

Re: Email transparency

#63

Post by _urga »

I have been working on this use case of private/shared email and have been testing in private beta for a year with a firm of 40 staff. If you are interested, please send me an email (joran@ronomon.com).

Re: Email transparency

#64

Post by buro9 »

Terretta wrote: post #35

Part of the issue around transparency is that email inbox silos may be the wrong tool for a collaborative and productive tech company. In general, email is now being seen (as often remarked by ShowHN MVPs) as To Do lists, and in a tech shop, multiple people have an interest in that process. This results in unenforceable policies about To: vs Cc: and unwieldy threads you're never sure if you should delete the tail nes…

I've used Request Tracker, I actually installed it at an all-Microsoft consulting firm ( http://www.pcubed.com/ ) around 2005.

Pcubed loved it, most of their consultants were out in the field and email was the only tool that we could guarantee that they all had access to. yet we could ensure that everyone involved with a client was included in any conversation about the client. Yes most would just filter these into folders so that if need be they could look things up, but what really made the difference was being able to manage meta-data and ticket state around the emails so that we could see that risks were mitigated, issues addressed.

Virtually no-one used the web interface in RT (except admins to configure new client emails and add users), and that was no surprise to us. We wrote a custom backend that would pull the data and dump it into SQL Server and then SharePoint and Reporting Server... for a Microsoft shop these were the tools they wanted, user controlled reporting capabilities and visibility in the place they were most likely to look (SharePoint).

RT is good, but it is a bit long in the tooth... have you seen http://copyin.com/ ?

http://copyin.com/

https://angel.co/copyin

CopyIn is not an RT clone, but it does provide group based email addresses, with a web front-end, wiki-spaces for those groups, and so on.

It's about a year old, started by a YC alum who is on here ( https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=petenixey ), and currently in a closed beta, but from what I've seen (a demo) it brings a very fresh approach to this whole problem space (email-centric group awareness and collaboration).

I'd say it's worth anyone looking to implement this stuff to ping Pete Nixey and see if they can get on the beta.

And as others are asking for disclaimers, I work for neither RequestTracker nor Copyin, having only implemented the former and seen a demo of the latter. Pete is a London based founder and I've met him quite a few times. I gain in no way from you choosing to use Copyin, but perhaps we all gain by a nicer tool emerging and getting established in this space.

Re: Email transparency

#66

Post by jeremysmyth »

buu700 wrote: post #61
Terretta wrote: post #35

Part of the issue around transparency is that email inbox silos may be the wrong tool for a collaborative and productive tech company. In general, email is now being seen (as often remarked by ShowHN MVPs) as To Do lists, and in a tech shop, multiple people have an interest in that process. This results in unenforceable policies about To: vs Cc: and unwieldy threads you're never sure if you should delete the tail nes…

You don't create a new email thread to give yourself a To Do item Maybe I'm just weird, but I do this pretty frequently (fire off quick instructions/reminders with "TODO:" prepended); after all, there's very little besides email that I care enough about to check frequently enough for any action items I assign to myself to matter. I understand and agree with the idea behind the "Show HN" projects you mention, but as a…

Maybe I'm just weird, but I do this [send emails as todo items] pretty frequently (fire off quick instructions/reminders with "TODO:" prepended);

It's also something that I do indirectly via Google Now or Samsung Voice - launch it, say "Note to self - Fix a time with Patricia" or "Remind me to book train tickets". It sends an email to me with that content.

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